Giving the Numbers a Face

A child soldier, to say the least, isn’t the kind of person you meet on the street every day. We hear about the faraway conflicts he’s forced into, but he remains little more than a number in the death toll, a nameless perpetrator of a brutality that’s incomprehensible to the modern, Western mind.

For Ishmael Beah, though, such a life was reality—a reality that he renders with emotional complexity in “A Long Way Gone: Memoirs of a Child Soldier.”

Beah, a former child soldier who spoke openly about his experiences at the United Nations First International Children’s Parliament, doesn’t focus on the messy political situation that has led several African nations, including his native Sierra Leone, into intractable civil wars.

Rather, his memoir is about understanding the dehumanizing process that leads armies of children to mutual slaughter—a goal made all the more important by the ongoing conflict in places like Darfur.

Combining his self-professed skill for remembering images with his ability to build tension, Beah highlights the effects of a brutal civil war that left a mark on anyone it touched. A child who loved hip hop and performed interpretative dances to the likes of LL Cool J, Beah lived a normal life that was interrupted by rebel soldiers who forced him to wander from town to town with his friends in search of safety.

After his parents were killed by the rebels, Beah was forced into the army at gunpoint, constantly reminded about his parents’ murder and fed drugs that numbed the physical pain of his wounds and made it possible for him to continue fighting and killing.

In one of the most outstanding emotional scenes, a verbal disagreement between Beah and his friends and soldiers recruited by the rebels soon turns physical, and Beah’s terse sentences build on one another to recreate the tension of the situation.

The fighters on both sides, Beah says, were “dangerous, and brainwashed to kill.” This isn’t an attempt to beat the reader over the head with a political message, but rather a moving description of an army life reminiscent of the Vietnam War—filled with drug use and instructions to ignore the safety on a gun.

One soldier even imitates Rambo, covering his face with mud and asking to take a rebel village by himself. For Beah, who describes the world through a fish-eye lens, the devil is in such details.

But Beah has taken upon himself a topic worthy of aerial photography. Even though Beah has left the big-picture politics out, the reader cannot help but ask related questions. One is left wondering what the international community was thinking when it allowed such a war to break out and wishing that the army of Sierra Leone had appealed to another country or a worldwide organization for help when the war began. But such absences feel purposeful: By ignorning politics, Beah allows his story to transcend them.

Writing as much a novel about ordinary life as war, Beah contrasts civilian and military life to define the two more precisely. He highlights the importance of family life and community in Sierra Leonean society, implying that the army had replaced his parents.

He also emphasizes how deeply local culture penetrates his life, to the extent that it gives him a reason to continue living. The contrast works most effectively when military and civilian life meet in one place after Beah is taken to a rehabilitation center by UNICEF workers.

Beah’s constant repetition of the civilian worker’s phrase “It’s not your fault…” allows the reader to experience the anger Beah and other former soldiers felt at having lost their power and the respect due to them while allowing Beah to bring the story into focus.

And that intimate focus, ultimately, is what makes Beah’s book so important. Beah is no longer a number in newsprint, but a name with a face that forces us to confront the horrifying realities of distant conflicts we’d like to ignore.